The team behind the institutional bitcoin exchange itBit is now also leading blockchain financial services developer Paxos.

The leadership team behind the New York based institutional Bitcoin exchange and blockchain technology company itBit has unveiled a new company named Paxos – inspired by a technical computer science term that represents a process for reaching consensus.

In June itBit has been selected by Euroclear group to explore opportunities for creating a next generation settlement service for the London gold market. itBit revealed that Euroclear has partnered with it because of its proprietary blockchain infrastructure technology and product, Bankchain. The Bankchain service is a private network of trusted participants that clears, tracks and settles trades in close to real-time.

Suggested articles

Now the technology is transferred under the brand of Paxos, and Bankchain will be the company’s flagship service – which will be offered to financial institutions as a cloud-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS).

Charles Cascarilla, CEO and co-founder, Paxos

“Increasingly, the financial services industry is embracing the transformative potential of blockchain technology. Paxos is making that potential a practical reality,” said Paxos CEO Charles Cascarilla. “Our collaboration with Euroclear to create a trusted blockchain settlement infrastructure for gold is just the beginning, and an important first for the industry.”

The company will obviously not comment on the matter but we can safely assume that this spin-off was made to disassociate the service for bitcoin which is still controversial for some established financial firms to even appear to work with. In recent years we have seen a clear trend of ventures dropping the ‘Bit’ or ‘Coin’ part of their names as they transitioned to blockchain development.